Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Valerie Mendelson painting to be paired with my poem this weekend at a group show entitled "The Image and the Word" sponsored by the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.

The exhibition takes place from May 26-June 17 at Westbeth Gallery, 55 Bethune Street (between Jane & W. 12th Streets).
Gallery hours are Thursday - Sunday 1-6 PM.


Click on link for details or read below:


The painting and my poem were posted on this blog on March 23, 2010.

Thanks, Valerie, for including my work with yours at the group show.





Sunday, May 27, 2012

The Avengers

Much as I love Robert Downey's sense of humor, and Scarlett Johansens' ability to look sexy while beating the tar out of villains, and I also was finally able to understand how Thor's hammer actually could be a secret weapon, I have a problem with action movies that treat Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building as targets for giant snakey lizards bent on destroying them. Because eventually they do. Hey. I live here. Don't do that. It makes me sad, and anxious.

Bring back the Ghostbusters. You see, I am not mature enough to handle the fantasy behind the big battle royal when it comes to my home town.

First Position



Ballet competition gives this movie its story. The question is who will win, who will not? As a result, the ending is manipulative and feels more like Rocky than it should.
Art and athletics sometimes do overlap, as in ice dancing, gymnastics, even high diving. So it is not as if the narrative is facile. It is just a little less satisfying to me, a devoted ballet goer for many years, to see the photography of the choreography chopped up, as if we would not be interested in seeing a whole dance performed well, with the dancer's whole body in view the whole time.

But this is really quibbling. The movie features some winning personalities, beginning with Aran Bell, an eleven year old boy whose father is in the navy which means that the family travels from place to place. Aran becomes friends with an Israeli dancer, Gaya Bommer Yemini. This adds an unexpected development to the story line, that people who are going through the same ordeal as you can provide even more meaningful support than your parents and teachers.

The parents and teachers presented are a mix of hard edged Tiger moms and soft hearted adopters of war refugees. The structure follows that used in Spellbound, the documentary film about spelling bee contestants. We follow along with five or six families, getting to know them, then having our hearts in our throats as one after the other is eliminated. I like it best when the film veers away from the grisly competitive edge at the center. Mostly this movie does that. In Spellbound, the movie presented families whose outsider status is overcome with education. In First Position, when the movie concentrates on the dancers' inner ambition, and perseverance, it breaks through and wins over any non ballet fan.


Valerie Mendelson has painted my portrait. We spent a few sunny hours on the roof while she and I talked and she worked in oils. I am very grateful to her for this. I like the picture. It shows a certain gaze I think that is true to me.



Saturday, May 19, 2012

Tom Cruise's Hair

Went to see Ghost Protocol in order not to have to think.  Tom Cruise has very good hair.  He looks pretty threatening in his hooded sweatshirt.  Something about the way the hood shadows his face makes it a sinister costume. Also you can't see his hair. Which is always perfect.

Cruise seems to take himself very seriously.  As I was watching the opening scene of a prison breakout in Russia, I kept thinking of those old Mad magazine parodies of action movies where people getting bonked would have stars float up above their heads.  The whole first half hour felt like a Mad magazine parody, and then slowly it settled down into something more resembling a conventional spy thriller.  When Jeremy Renner and Tom Wilkinson entered the scene, I breathed a sigh of relief because these two actors have nothing to prove.  They are simply good at what they do.

Paula Patton, where did she come from? The director has her take a long time getting changed in the car when she and Cruise are making their getaway.  It is not clear if she can act or not, but she had a more substantive role in Precious.  A token girl spy with a beautiful body, she is sort of the new Hallie Barry.







Nanni Moretti

from Palombella Rossa
Nanni Moretti is sometimes compared to Woody Allen.  He writes, directs, and often appears as a major character in his films.  Though his tone is humorous, Moretti considers politics, life and death, the future of cinema, and other less cursory things that make you not laugh so much as think very hard afterward about you just saw.

Otherwise, I don't think that the comparison between the two men is just.  Moretti is very athletic, for instance.  In his last movie, Habeas Papem, he plays a psychiatrist who coaches a team of cardinals in the Vatican in volleyball.  Moretti is quite capable of instructing how to spike the ball.  He is lean, and tall, and coordinated.  

Still, one of the first Moretti films I saw, Palombella Rossa, was about two things: communism and water polo. Moretti was the lead, and he spent most of the film dressed in one of those water polo helmets that are inherently funny to look at.   He was on the national Italian team when he was in his twenties, and was obviously very good at it.

The night I saw him in person, after the screening of Il Caimano (thanks to IFC which is running a retrospective of his work), he spoke with a translator about why he made the movie.  The movie is about a movie producer who up until a woman hands him a screenplay,  has only made grade B movies that are strictly genre pieces and sort of laughable, but cult hits.  The new screenplay is an open critique of Berlusconi's regime,  a very serious movie,  that shows how he has stripped Italy of its democracy and put himself above the law.

Moretti said that he wanted to show the Italian people what they were used to seeing but because they were so used to seeing it, it had lost all sense of its danger.  He wanted to show the dangerous side of Berlusconi.  He avoided  the bits about Berlusconi's cosmetic surgery and his fascination with young women.  The real danger was in how he subverted democracy by outwitting the judiciary who had prosecuted him for financial fraud and conflict of interest.

After Moretti spoke at length about the making of the movie about Berlusconi, through a charming translator who was able to keep up with his spirited and quick witted commentary in Italian, the director wanted to show us two minutes from an earlier film, the film about water polo and communism.  The reason was long in being explained.  The scene included an old friend of Moretti who had been cast as one o f the water polo players. In the scene, the coach wanted the slender, even slight of build teammate to act as point  guard to a big burly Hungarian.  At this point, the dialogue called for the man to object simply by saying "I am scared."

Which the actor/friend did.  But Moretti insisted on his saying the line twenty six more times, taking another two full minutes to do it, goading him on all the while.  The man is still playing water polo, Moretti explained, but I am no longer his friend.  He never spoke to me again after that. 

The point of the story was to demonstrate how obsessive he is as a director to be sure that everything is just right.  Each take that the young man made was better than the next, even though the first one was perfectly good.  I wonder where that man is now, and if it is true that they are no longer friends.

Monsieur Lazhar







The main character of this movie is a teacher who replaces mid-year a teacher who has died by her own hand.   Not only was the students' original teacher a suicide, but she killed herself in the classroom during recess when the door was locked, leaving a lone student sent to deliver milk the task of seeing her body swinging from a rope.

This sordid fact and horrific image leave a huge task for the next teacher.  His name and his origin are not of Montreal, Canada; Bachir Lazhar comes from Algeria.  He brings with him high expectations for the students, and an old school style that the students are not used to.

Equally alienating for Monsieur Lazhar is the compartmentalization of grief and its exclusive assignment for treatment to the psychologist.  Lazhar witnesses the students trying to cope with their confusion and messy feelings toward their dead teacher.  His instinct is to help them through, but the administration and the psychologist shut him out of the process.

  This movie touches the viewer very simply with the steps the students and the teacher take to work with each other.  In the course of the film, two students especially benefit from Lazhar's work.  Alice with her large eyes and plump mouth has also seen the corpse of her teacher, and must struggle largely alone at home since her mother works as a pilot and is often away.  Alice understands quickly the benefit of having Lazhar, with his strange yet demanding manners, as her teacher's replacement.  Their relationship forms the core of the story and shows how teachers and students learn from each other when there is mutual respect.

Sophie Nelisse plays Alice
Simon, the boy doomed to deliver milk to the locked classroom (how haunting that image is, of the small square boxes of milk spilled on the floor) is angry and upset and unjustly accused of bearing some responsibility for the teacher's death.  Lazhar breaks through to him quietly and surely. The filming is gently paced.

I wonder what school psychologists think of this film.
Its treatment of loss and how untrained people are capable of helping each other through trauma makes a plea for less expertise and more humanism.


Sunday, May 6, 2012

Brooklyn Botanical Gardens

In Brooklyn April 14, the nature and human nature were on display.


 

so much green

 

 





































Pirates



What a delight it was to see this witty movie today. It combines the science of Charles Darwin, the hegemony of Queen Victoria, and
the silliness of Pirate stereotypes. The Aardman studio claymation characters have always been finely textured. I think of Gromit's eyebrows rising up and down in an actorly way.

Now that the figures are digitally enhanced, the Pirate Captain's beard
is especially sumptuous. It is even capable of hiding a dodo bird in its thick curls.

Anyone who thinks that this movie is strictly for children is going to miss the wit of a pirate asking, when facing Darwin and his
trained monkey, "Are you two related?"